CS 4457

Unless you are doing the cybersecurity focal path, do not take this class. The course material itself is interesting, but the way that it was presented was extremely hard to follow. The lectures did not follow a clear, logical flow. Final grades are broken down into 20% weekly quizzes, 60% homeworks, and 20% final. The homework assignments came about weekly and required several hours of coding how networks work, which often came with dealing with bugs in the simulator that was provided or with built-in Python modules rather than demonstrating understanding of the concepts. The quizzes were similar to that of CSO2: a few questions worth about 4 points each, so missing one would get you a failing grade on the quiz. I had gone to Reiss's office hours for a plan to succeed in this class when I was struggling to get the material to stick. Instead, he berated me for an hour, said that I was not using the skills of a professional software developer, and told me to post my questions on Piazza. His responses on Piazza were timely, but with a small number of TAs for a class of 50+ students, the course experience was miserable.